Public housing tenants filed a stunning lawsuit against the city Thursday night, alleging that the NYPD is illegally surveilling tenants via technology installed to provide NYCHA tenants free WiFi during the COVID-19 pandemic.
By using the bandwidth from NYCHA’s free WiFi program, called Big Apple Connect, the suit charges that NYPD linked NYCHA CCTV cameras to its Domain Awareness System, a vast repository of data collected from and about New Yorkers, and granted itself a 24/7 remote feed of the hallways, elevators and public spaces of at least 220 NYCHA buildings. This allows officers to watch the feed for as long as they’d like, wherever they’d like – including on cops’ phones – without independent limits or oversight, the plaintiffs argued.
Attorneys representing tenants told amNewYork that such actions are illegal and concerning for a variety of reasons. They allege it’s a violation of NYCHA tenants’ First Amendment right to free expression via the surveillance, violates Fourth Amendment search and privacy protections and presents civil rights issues of racial profiling — as only public housing tenants are subject to such surveillance, a group that’s predominantly Black and Latine — violating both local laws and the Fourteenth Amendment.
“Any officer can just watch in real time any surveillance footage they want for whatever reason,” said tenant attorney Jeremy Ravinsky of Beldock Levine & Hoffman. “That could be innocuous, but it can also be really dangerous to give people the ability to surveil public housing residents at will.”
“And, the deeper reason that we’re super concerned about this,” he added, “Is because it’s an expansion of what’s becoming a totalizing surveillance regime that the NYPD is setting up and that public housing residents historically have been the guinea pigs of.”
Spokespeople for Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not respond to amNewYork’s request for comment. The city’s Law Department said it would not comment on the suit, but would review and investigate the claims.
NYPD does not dispute use of NYCHA cams
Through the DAS database, the NYPD can develop comprehensive profiles of individual New Yorkers, tracking their movements, habits, and routines, the suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, says.
“Public housing residents’ daily lives—when they leave for and return from work, who they invite into their apartments, when they take their children to school—will be monitored, cataloged and analyzed by the NYPD through this surveillance expansion,” the suit continues, adding that the database is used to develop the department’s facial recognition system and predictive policing models.
The fact that the NYPD is using the technology associated with NYCHA’s free WiFi to provide it with remote access to the public housing provider’s CCTV cameras is not disputed by the department: It’s spoken about the plan publicly at past City Council hearings, touting the policy as a helpful crime solving measure and has acknowledged that there are no safeguards in place to prevent “improper use,” according to the suit.
At a City Council hearing on concerns over the plan last year, the NYPD emphasized that they have always had access to these cameras, so they didn’t see an issue with this. Before this shift, they had to request CCTV footage from NYCHA — noting specific times relative to an ongoing investigation that they want to look at — and had controlled viewing of the footage.
Having to request the access or physically go to NYCHA houses to see it slowed them down, police said, so it’s critical to have this remote access so they can jump on to check out what’s going on whenever they need to to preserve public safety.
Attorneys said that doesn’t make sense and is unnecessary, beyond their contention that the civil rights concerns don’t outweigh any alleged benefit police may get from having to hop over this low barrier.
“It wasn’t difficult before. NYCHA had a line available to them 24/7 and provided that footage willingly for investigations,” Ravinsky said. “Part of our question is, ‘Why was this necessary?’ I think we’re of the very strong opinion it was absolutely not necessary when they already had that line. It’s disingenuous for them to say that there’s no meaningful difference …This is a much, much broader scope of access, by orders of magnitude.”
Before disclosing the practice, the department initially tried to conceal it, denying the hookup had occurred through August 2025 while later admitting it had brought 68 NYCHA buildings into its database and remote access system in June of that year, attorneys said.
It’s a concerning police practice to collect all of this camera footage in an NYPD database because of how the NYPD uses the information in the Domain Awareness System database, attorneys said. The department will be able to use the footage to train their facial recognition and predictive policing technology – new algorithms that police across the country are using to “forecast” where and when future crimes will happen, which studies have shown to have racial bias.
“That’s bad for living in a free society without permeating police surveillance,” Ravinsky said. “It is also really bad for a society that distributes its policing resources in an equitable way. If the information you are feeding into these algorithms is culled from a particular population, this population being predominantly Black and Latine and low income, then it’s just going to create a self-reinforcing feedback loop that’s going to continue the history of overpolicing this population.”
“It’s like the algorithmic equivalent of a circular argument,” Ravinsky added. “Except instead of just being logically invalid, it’s also racist and very dangerous.”
The attorneys say it is also deteriorating trust between public housing tenants, city government and the NYPD.
One of tenant associations suing, Langston Hughes Tenants Association, has a strong relationship with the NYPD and had advocated for the Big Apple Connect WiFi program, but was still caught blindsided and left feeling betrayed by the policy.
“The president of that tenant association specifically was very involved with the city in the rollout of Big Apple Connect, and yet he had no idea that Big Apple Connect was going to be used in this way,” said Brooklyn Defenders attorney Anca Grigore, who serves as the director of the firm’s Seizure & Surveillance Defense Project.
The department never gave any public notice of the practice before launching it, a requirement under POST Act, the suit alleges. It’s also unclear how far-reaching the implementation of this practice has gone: the NYPD has said it planned to roll it out at “almost all” NYCHA buildings, but it hasn’t shared which ones have been entered into this system yet.
“It’s troubling that under this administration, which made a promise to change the way public safety is provided to citizens, we’re seeing the expansion of a system that is undermining nature residents’ trust in their public servants,” Ravinsky said. “That’s a problem.”
The last publicly noted number is from September 2025, when the police department said it linked footage from 220 buildings.
“All of this happened under the guise of a free Wi-Fi internet program that was supposed to be a subsidized program for NYCHA residents and their children, rolled out near COVID times, where kids were doing school from home,” Grigore said. “This program was advertised and touted as a way to close the digital divide, and it was really exciting. To learn all these years later that secretly the city was planning on using that connection to surveil nature residents instead is really disappointing.”